Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

Although the relation between Boccaccio and Fiammetta is, like
that between Petrarch and Laura, fundamentally a literary one, there
has been a long-standing belief in the historicity of the lady.
Fiammetta was taken as the poetical name for Maria d'Aquino, the
supposed illegitimate daughter of King Robert of Naples. No such
person has been discovered to exist, however, and twentieth-century
scholarship discounts this traditional biographical identification. It was
one to which DGR, however, like nearly everyone else, adhered.

The Boccaccio/Fiammetta relation is most important for DGR's work
because it sets a model for a secondary pursuit of Dante's primary idea and
ideal of Beatrice. And it is perhaps more important than the Petrarch/Laura
relation exactly because, as all scholars agreed, Laura was primarily a
literary and aesthetic figure, not Petrarch's actual beloved.

Textual History: Composition

There is a corrected manuscript of the poem in the
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. This appears to be the earliest text. Two other (later) manuscripts are known:
one gathered
in the book of manuscript materials (the so-called Getty-Wormsley book), the
other held in the library of the Delaware Art Museum.